In 1979, in the Hydrostone neighbourhood of Halifax, June’s son Gerald goes missing. Gerald, at 28, is a little strange, a little slow, by neighbourhood parlance, and June panics about where he’s gone. Gerald wanted to go west, it’s revealed, looking for his father, a man he doesn’t know anything about, because June has refused to discuss it or acknowledge it since she had Gerald as a teenager.
Lulu, a teenage cashier at the drugstore, is drawn to Gerald’s case as a missing person, looking at it as her first big mystery with her friend Janet, and also the last time she’ll do this sort of game, before they enter high school. While June is struggling to manage Gerald and her mother with steadily-apparent dementia, Lulu’s struggling to make friends, deal with her arguing parents, and deal with the angst of being a teenager in the midst of the transition to high school.
Susan LeBlanc has written an intimate story of a community, and a time that we’ve left behind at least on paper. If you know anything about Halifax, you know that it’s always living in a loop of timelessness. Just as I’d be trying to sort out a location LeBlanc referred to, there’d be another reference to a place still there, unchanged in 45 years. It’s a time capsule in addition to a story about women in what was still a conservative era, and a conservative community. Both Lulu and June are placed into the roles that the neighbourhood has for them, and their attempts to reshape them are not always met with approval or support. The Nowhere Places takes place over a transformative year for both characters, even as they exist in different points in their lives.
… as much a love letter to the challenges of girlhood and womanhood as it is to the north end of Halifax, a very rich and vibrant community.
The Nowhere Places is enchanting — certainly, living in the north end of Halifax and travelling the same streets as June and Lulu predisposed me to fall in love with this plucky little novel. But I think the magic is more than that. It’s about two very different people, whose lives touch one another in the same neighbourhood, and it’s as much a love letter to the challenges of girlhood and womanhood as it is to the north end of Halifax, a very rich and vibrant community. (I don’t think it’s any accident that the books I’ve read about Halifax are often set in the north end. It’s a place wealthy with stories.) This was a delightful book to read.
Born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Susan LeBlanc worked as a newspaper and magazine journalist for twenty years. She later taught journalism at the University of King’s College. In 2018, she was shortlisted for the Budge Wilson Short Fiction Prize, through the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia. She was selected for the 2022 Alistair MacLeod Mentorship Program. LeBlanc lives in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. This is her first novel.
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing (September 24, 2024)
Paperback 8.5″ x 5.5″ | 306 pages
ISBN: 9781774713280
Alison Manley has ricocheted between New Brunswick and Nova Scotia for most of her life. Now in Halifax, Nova Scotia, she is the Cataloguing and Metadata Librarian at Saint Mary's University. Her past life includes a long stint as a hospital librarian on the banks of the mighty Miramichi River. She has an honours BA in political science and English from St. Francis Xavier University, and a Master of Library and Information Studies from Dalhousie University. While she's adamant that her love of reading has nothing to do with her work, her ability to consume large amounts of information very quickly sure is helpful. She is often identified by her very red lipstick, and lives with her partner Brett and cat, Toasted Marshmallow.
